Fortunate
by DramaLexy
Summary: .'In that moment, as the rest of the CIC celebrated, he remembered how to breathe.' A look inside Adama's head at the end of Episode 5: 'You Can't Go Home Again.'


TITLE: Fortunate

AUTHOR: DramaLexy

DISCLAIMER: If ONLY I owned this show...but I don't

SUMMARY: "In that moment, as the rest of the CIC celebrated, he remembered how to breathe." A look inside Adama's head at the end of Episode 5: 'You Can't Go Home Again.'

DISTRIBUTION: If you want it, be my guest, just let me know where.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This popped into my head after watching the rerun of the episode and having a rather long philosophical debate about the show with one of my friends. I just thought that the two episodes had put Adama in a rather interesting position and wanted to elaborate on it. Some of the stuff came from the deleted scene from the eppie that's on (check it out if you can; they really should have left the scene in) Hope you enjoy!

* * *

"It's Starbuck!" 

"What?" William Adama was almost afraid to believe his son. It couldn't be; she wasn't really... "Come again, Apollo?"

"Uh, Galactica, the Cylon Raider is marked 'Starbuck'; it's written under the frakkin wing!"

In that moment, as the rest of the CIC celebrated, he remembered how to breathe. Two days earlier, he learned his 'daughter' had killed his son. Two minutes earlier, his daughter was gone, too. Two seconds earlier, his only remaining child had been on the brink of death, but now...

Now he had them back. The son he'd nearly lost far too many times, and the daughter…the daughter that had lied to him and cried with him and found herself a place so deep in his heart that he didn't think he could turn away from her even if he had to.

"…It's got to be her. This thing is flying with some serious attitude."

Adama allowed himself a smile as he watched their signals on Dradis get closer to the ship. He had them back. They'd almost been gone, but…

_It would have been on you_, a little voice in the back of his mind said, and he knew it was right. If they had jumped, they would have given up on her only a few moments too soon, and it would have been on his order. And Lords, if Lee had shot her down…

He couldn't leave the CIC for a little while – they still had to complete their jump and check in with the rest of the fleet and his officers. One of their launch tubes was still fouled, but they'd at least gotten Hotdog out of his Viper. By the time Adama was finally able to turn things over to Saul, they were supposed to have a new CAP getting launched, or at least that's what Apollo said. He'd also reported to his father that upon removal from her latest toy Kara had seemed all right, all things considered. Adama sent a silent prayer to the Lords for that as he made his way to the Life Station.

Cottle was looking at some patient's scan when the Commander came in; Adama decided not to comment on the fact that the doctor was smoking in an undesignated area while on duty. "How's she doing, Doc?"

The Major smirked. "Got a knee like a smashed melon. I'm surprised she could crawl, let alone walk." But Kara was full of surprises that way. It was when she started conforming to expectations that Adama knew he'd have to be worried.

"Painful?" he asked. _As if she hasn't been through enough…as if we all haven't been through enough._

"Damn right. She isn't going to be walking, much less flying, anytime soon."

He'd been afraid of that. Keeping Kara grounded for any length of time would be just as torturous for everyone else involved as it would be for her. "Don't let her know that yet," Adama requested. Getting into a cockpit would be her main motivation for getting out of that bed, and he wasn't going to make it any harder for her if he could help it.

"Good luck keeping that from her for very long," Cottle told him with a chuckle. "She's in there."

Adama nodded. "Thank you, Doc."

Stepping around the corner, Adama just took in Kara's appearance for a moment, taking advantage of the fact that she had yet to notice his arrival. Her leg was in a brace and iced, and there was something just so wrong about seeing her confined to that bed. The woman he'd come to know was constantly full of life and energy and damned near impossible to stop. He'd admired that, seen himself in her, and maybe seen what he wished Zak could have been. Deep down he'd known, of course, that Zak was not a pilot, but he'd wished. He'd made the same judgments that Kara had, just on a less significant scale. His youngest son had loved flight, though, so maybe with the right instruction, maybe with enough time, maybe if Adama pulled a few strings…

The thought that maybe he would end up a smoking wreck in an Academy hangar never crossed his mind, and knowing Kara as he did, he knew it had never crossed her mind either. She didn't think like that; any fighter pilot worth their wings didn't spend more than a nanosecond worrying about worst-case-scenario, or else they had a high probability of winding up a corpse. It had been a very, very stupid decision, granted, but he knew she wasn't the only one who had ever made it. She was human, after all, and her faults – like her strengths – made her the person that she was. Adama had also just proven the lengths he would go to – risking more than 45,000 lives, not just one – for someone he cared about.

Kara looked up, having felt his eyes on her, and he could tell that she wasn't quite sure what to say – wasn't sure what was going on behind his eyes. He relaxed her a little bit with a smile. "How are you feeling?"

"Been a hell of a lot worse. Don't have any ambrosia, but the Doc can fix you up with some really nice stuff." The smile on her face dimmed a little bit. "It's not bad, is it?" she asked him. "The knee?"

"Doc says it's too early to tell," they both knew that was a lie; Adama could almost hear Cottle snickering on the other side of the room. "Knowing you, you'll be fine." She nodded slowly. "Kara…"

"Yeah?" He stepped toward her, reaching into his pocket for something that Lee had given him when they'd spoken earlier.

"You did good," Adama whispered as he kissed her forehead and slipped her ring – Zak's ring – back onto its customary position on her thumb. "You did real good." Stepping back, he smiled at her, noticing that her eyes were unusually bright. He knew better than to comment, but wondered when she had started hiding her tears from him. He'd seen her fall apart more times than probably anyone else – not even Lee, and especially not Zak. "You need anything?" Kara smiled.

"A stogie would be nice."

"I had a feeling." He pulled one out of his other pocket and handed it to her. Weeks ago, he'd put two of them aside – one for each of them to enjoy after Galactica's decommissioning. Somewhere along the line, he'd smoked one of the two, but still had Kara's. "It's my last one," he told her, "So enjoy."

"Thank you."

"Get some rest," he said before turning to leave.

At one point in his life, when he'd thought about retiring, he imagined some house on Caprica or perhaps Picon with his wife, a couple grandchildren running around, and maybe even going fishing. In the weeks before the Cylon attack, that vision had morphed to a place on Caprica that wasn't too far from a space port so that Kara and other friends could easily come to visit when they were on leave. Nowadays, retirement wasn't a word in their collective vocabulary; Lords willing, 'the Old Man' would be running things for a long while to come.

The CIC was full of noise and activity when he returned to it, and Adama noticed that Lee was still there, talking with Tigh. He finished his conversation with the Colonel and approached his father. "Both launch tubes are now clear," he reported in.

"Thank you."

"How's our girl?" Lee quietly asked after a moment's pause.

"Still with us."

"And how are you?" he inquired, a little more hesitantly. Adama thought about that as he looked at the paper one of the officers had just handed him.

"Fortunate," he finally told his son. "Rather fortunate."

* * *

FIN 

So...how bad was it?


End file.
